InfoQ Homepage Software Craftsmanship Content on InfoQ
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Rightsizing Platform Engineering: Building the Platform Your Organization Actually Needs
Shift-left and DevOps have impacted how we flow changes from inception to production, but at the cost of increased cognitive load and duplication of effort across testing, security, and maintenance. This article explores the real-world challenges of rightsizing developer platforms and finding a cultural match for engineering teams who use them to reduce cognitive load and deliver change faster.
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Agentic Fitness Functions: Extending Evolutionary Architecture Beyond Deterministic Rules
Deterministic rules safeguard hard metrics, but what about architectural intent? Discover how agentic fitness functions combine AI agents and versioned rubrics to evaluate complex, judgment-heavy concerns—such as boundary fidelity, semantic contract drift, and stale ADR assumptions. Elevate evolutionary architecture governance with continuous, calibrated feedback loops.
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A Better Alternative to Reducing CI Regression Test Suite Sizes
How can you focus in a sea of results from a large regression test suite? This article describes a stochastic approach that relies on some degree of redundancy in your CI regression test set. This approach does not guarantee you will catch every bug every time, but it gives you your best bet of not missing the subtle signatures of all the bugs uncovered by your CI regression test suite runs.
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Legacy Modernization: Architecting Real-Time Systems around a Mainframe
At its heart, our transformation journey is about breaking dependencies at multiple levels. Many enterprises face similar challenges with legacy systems: tightly coupled architectures that are difficult to scale, change, or maintain. For us at National Grid, the solution came through four complementary paradigms that worked together to enable different forms of decoupling.
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Reaching Your Automatic Testing Goals by Enhancing Your Test Architecture
If you have automatic end-to-end tests, you have test architecture, even if you’ve never given it a thought. Test architecture encompasses everything from code to more theoretical concerns like enterprise architecture, but with concrete, immediate consequences. Let's explore how you can achieve the goals you have for your automatic testing effort.
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How Rules Can Foster Creativity: the Design System of Reykjavík
The value of design systems is especially evident in the public sector, where the need to use taxpayer money effectively aligns with the demand for user-centered solutions. By examining Reykjavík’s design system, we can gain insights into how design systems promote creativity, efficiency, and collaboration, with implications for both private and public sectors.
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Jump into the Demoscene: Where Logic, Creativity, and Artistic Expression Merge
The demoscene is a vibrant, creative subculture where you can use mathematics, algorithms, creativity, and a wee bit of chaos to express yourself. In this article, I want to inspire you to grab the opportunity to get your voice and vision on the table, and show you that the demoscene is not only for mathematical wizards.
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How to Make Technical Debt Your Friend
Technical debt is a popular metaphor for communicating the long-term implications of architectural decisions and trade-offs to stakeholders. By exploiting the feedback mechanism of the Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA) approach, we have concluded that the technical debt metaphor is misleading because much of the so-called debt never needs to be, and in fact isn’t, repaid.
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Simplicity, Speed, and Re-Use. Shipping Threads in 5 Months
In Jan 2023, we received word that we’d need to build a microblogging service to compete with Twitter in a couple of months. A small team was assembled to take on that challenge, and we shipped a new social network in July. This article describes how we developed and launched the Threads app at Meta last year.
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How Quality Champions Foster Sustainable Software Quality Improvement at Swiss Post
Even skilled and motivated agile teams sometimes fail to achieve their own software quality goals. In this article, we present a practice we use to assist agile teams in reaching their quality goals and share our experience. The practice is about paying constant attention to specific metrics. It means encouraging people to improve themselves in both qualitative and quantitative ways.
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How to Get Tech-Debt on the Roadmap
Only doing product-led work can lead to an unmaintainable system with lots of downtime. Unfortunately, getting time to work on the things that would prevent that can be challenging. Engineering roadmaps balance many competing demands, and the people making the decisions aren’t always the closest to the code. There is a need to learn how to speak their language.
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Efficiently Arranging Test Data: Streamlining Setup with Instancio
The need to ensure code quality is ubiquitous, regardless of the development paradigm. Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery indicate that reliable test suites are directly connected to the speed of development and quicker customer feedback loop. Instancio automates the data setup step - the A in Arrange-Act-Assert. So, it allows you to put more emphasis on the business feature tested.